The Path to a Trump-Harris Administration?

The indictment of President Trump and the subsequent surge in his polling numbers underscore both the former president’s legal peril and political durability. It also sets the stage for a possible constitutional conundrum: Two men from the same state could share a ticket, but with a hitch.The hitch is that electors in Florida — part of the Electoral College — are forbidden by the Constitution from voting for two candidates from the same state. So if voters in Florida had to choose between Messrs. Trump and DeSantis, they could vote against Mr. DeSantis for vice president.The point here is not that this is a likely result; it’s but a theoretical possibility. The result, though, could in theory be, say, Mr. Trump for president and Kamala Harris as vice president, if the election were close enough to be decided by Florida’s votes. This constitutional quirk comes to mind as Mr. Trump pulls out a Secretariat-scale lead over his closest rival, Governor DeSantis. It appears the Sunshine State leader could be more likely cast as a running mate for Mr. Trump than a candidate to topple him. The latest Fox News poll, released just before news of the indictment broke, has Mr. Trump at 54 percent, and Mr. DeSantis at 24 percent. A YahooNews/YouGov tally, issued after the indictment became known, has the margin at 57 to 31 percent, in Mr. Trump’s favor. Even as the former president launches a Truth Social blitz against the governor, Mr. DeSantis has held his fire, calling Mr. Trump’s indictment “un-American” and adding that Florida would not assist in an extradition “given the questionable circumstances at issue.”While the Constitution ordains extradition from one state to another and Mr. Trump plans to appear for his arraignment on Tuesday, Mr. DeSantis’s hesitance to criticize Mr. Trump — despite a barrage of insults trained in the governor’s direction — is striking more observers as less savvy forbearance and more an unwillingness to take on the prohibitive favorite.Mr. DeSantis appears to be trailing Mr. Trump, but he is lapping the rest of the field. That Fox News poll has his closest contender, Vice President Pence, garnering support that amounts to just 6 percent, 18 points behind the Floridian. The numbers suggest that a team of Messrs. Trump and DeSantis, who is just 44 years old, would make a certain amount of electoral sense. The rub, though, is that both contenders are residents of Florida. Mr. DeSantis lives at the governor’s mansion at Tallahassee, and Mr. Trump is in residence at Mar-a-Lago, at Palm Beach, a little more than 400 miles away. He made that manse his primary residence in 2019, transferring that designation from Trump Tower, at New York City.While Mr. DeSantis has given no indication of interest in the vice presidency — his gubernatorial victory in November was resounding — if he does join forces with his state’s most famous resident, election observers would do well to consult the historical annals. Between 1789 and 1804, members of the Electoral College did not cast a separate vote for president and vice president, as they do today. Rather, one ballot was cast, and the top vote-getter was named president; the runner-up became vice president. That ended after the chaos of the election of 1800, when Aaron Burr tied his running mate Thomas Jefferson at the top of the ticket. The 12th Amendment, ratified in 1804, ordains in part: “The Electors shall meet in their respective states and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves; they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President.”That amendment also dictates that “the President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted” — that clause was the rationale behind Vice President Pence’s determination that the Constitution did not give him the power to refuse to certify votes on January 6, 2021.The amendment’s instruction that either the president or vice president “shall not be an inhabitant of the same state as themselves” was retained from the procedure inherited from Article II of the Constitution, an expression of the Framers’ mistrust of concentrated power. While the president and vice president could hail from the same state, an elector from that state could not vote for both. This possibility moved from theoretical conjecture to electoral possibility in the election of 2000, exactly 200 years after Jefferson edged Burr for the first of his two terms. Initially, both President Bush and Vice President Cheney were residents of Texas, where the latter had moved in 1995 after previously representing Wyoming in Congress. Mr. Cheney switched his driver’s license and registration back to Wyoming before Election Day, a move that was challenged in federal court. The district judge who heard the case ruled that Mr. Cheney had “both a physical presence within the state of Wyoming and the intent that Wyoming be his place of habitation.” An appellate court affirmed, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.If Messrs. Cheney and Bush were each deemed Texans, the Lone Star State’s 32 electors would have been barred from voting for both, likely bouncing Mr. Cheney from the ticket. As it happened, that election was decided when Mr. Bush was awarded 271 electoral votes, with the outcome hinging on, of all places, Florida. Speculation about a DeSantis presidency, of the country if not the White House, could be heating up. Asked last week on NewsMax if he would consider being Mr. Trump’s veep, Mr. DeSantis allowed: “I think I am probably more of an executive guy. I think that you want to be able to do things. That’s part of the reason I got into this job, is because we have action.”

The Path to a Trump-Harris Administration?

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